[Arm-netbook] Doing without systemd

[Hendrik Boom]

On Tue, Jul 04, 2017 at 10:09:45AM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 8:17 AM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at cohens.org.il> wrote:
> 
> > In another thread someone mentioned trusting people. I trust the
> > maintainer of angband.pl generally more than maintainers of Devuan, from
> > observed behavior.
> 
>  *sigh* i love what the devuan team have done: they've achieved a hell
> of a lot.  the only thing is: their stated mission statement is "to
> give people free choice over their init service".  and... err... the
> lack of support for systemd makes that mission statement a false
> statement.
> 
>  devuan is therefore a backlash *against* systemd.  if they were true
> to their mission statement they would add the option to include it.


The official line is that, if you want Devuan with systemd you should 
simply install Debian, which *is* Devuan with systemd.  Thus you have 
choice, which you wouldn't have with Debian alone.

It doesn't enable you to simply boot with systemd on even-numbered days 
and without it on odd-numbered days, but it is a reasonable compromise, 
given their lack of resources.

-- hendrik

P.S.  Technically, Debian itself does make it possible to have a 
system without systemd, but you have to install with systemd and then 
replace it.  And there are a lot of packages that depend on systemd, 
but don't in Devuan, so the option isn't as viable as it is presented. 

> 
>  what would be really *really* handy is if someone modified
> angband.pl's packaging so that it compiled *both* systemd *and*
> systemd-less packages, making the systemd-less variants e.g. of udev
> as "udev-nosystemd" and  using "Provides: udev" (or whatever
> appropriate debian control magic is necessary).
> 
>  the reason for that would be that the angband.pl variants could then
> actually be proposed for inclusion in debian.

It would have been good of Debian to have adopted a policy like that.
Instead they didn't even make systemd a choice at installation time.

-- hendrik